


One Year Gone

by Scuffin_MacGuffin



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 12:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scuffin_MacGuffin/pseuds/Scuffin_MacGuffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It's been a year since she was last in Ferelden.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Year Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Written a couple of years ago for a friend to fulfill the following request: "Aveline, Isabela, and fur."

+

It's been a year since she was last in Ferelden, but the higher they climb up Sundermount, the more Aveline is reminded of home: the familiar chill that makes the very air seem loose, makes the sky into a thin grey film as transient as condensation huffed over cold glass, makes frost spider across her armor until she shines like a knight from a story book. It’s new armor, that she’s wearing now; she'd left her old plate back at Ostagar, cut herself out of it because a darkspawn's mace had made it un-wearable and her fingers had been shaking too badly to manage the straps. An expensive thing to have to abandon, for all that it had served its worth by leaving her only with a continent-sized bruise spreading across her stomach instead of a crushed set of ribs, and after she'd gotten out of it she'd only had her leathers, shivering sleeveless as she searched for Wesley, shivering sleeveless as she left his unburied body behind--

Aveline doesn't much _like_ being reminded of home.

But luckily -- or not -- there are some things that are completely unfamiliar.

"Kitten," announces Isabela loudly, "When we get back to Kirkwall, you are getting a pair of boots. And I'm not taking _no_ for an answer." She shrugs her preponderance of raven hair over one shoulder, somehow still sleek and shining, though nothing Aveline does keeps hers from turning into a fizzy crow's nest in the dry air. Shining and thick and perfect, yes, and much too much of it to ever fit under a regulation helmet. Isabela has much too much of everything, couldn't fit under regulation _anything_ if she tried, honestly -- and Aveline is only looking because of the ridiculousness of worrying about Merrill's cold feet when she herself is kitted out in nothing more than rough linen (and has been insisting since they left the city that she doesn't feel the cold). Hawke had forced Isabela to take one of her cloaks, but she's still got all that _leg,_ and the way her chest moves when she bounds up the path is… not much of anything, really. At all.

Aveline turns her attention resolutely to Hawke's heels just as Merrill assures Isabela that it's alright because elves have thick-skinned feet.

"Thick-skinned feet?"

"That's what I said."

"Kitten?"

"Yes?"

"You're shitting me."

"I for one don't doubt a Dalish Keeper's knowledge of her own people," calls Hawke mildly from over her shoulder, head turned just enough to catch the soppy glance Merrill shoots her. All Aveline catches is the exaggerated way Isabela rolls her eyes.

"I'm sure that's not what Isabela meant," Merrill assures.

"Not at all," agrees Isabela. "But thick skin or no, I _am_ buying you a pair of boots."

There is something about the woman that just makes her want to pick and pick, like wiggling a tooth, or testing the edges of a festering wound. "You know, saying that you've lost all your clothes in a shipwreck stops being a good excuse once you've started offering to buy things for _other_ people."

"Problem with what I'm wearing, Big Girl?" Isabela leers, letting her borrowed cloak slip off one dark shoulder.

In spite of everything, Aveline feels a blush creeping high along her cheekbones. Score one for the pirate, damn her. She would chalk it up to the cold, but she knows Isabela wouldn't believe her.

She lets the matter drop as gracefully as she's able and focuses very hard on thinking of nothing, but it's a difficult thing to do without a shield in hand and the dull black-oil glint of darkspawn armor gleaming under the moonlight. There's a low, empty buzz that fills her mind before battle, in the tense moments before the charge, the difference between the soldiers who shiver and wish frantically for it to be over and the soldiers who have to stop themselves from leaping forward with the hounds. But outside of those moments, she has never had a good way of clearing her head or calming her nerves. It's mostly useless, but she tries anyway, concentrating so hard that when Hawke stops walking she runs straight into her back.

Isabela is laughing, and Aveline feels her blush worsen. _Entirely_ useless.

"Er, I don't mean to be disheartening," says Hawke, "But... haven't we passed this way before?"

Merrill blinks and looks around. "Oh! You mean you haven't been circling on purpose? I thought perhaps you liked the view." Aveline wonders if sheer, disgusting earnestness is an arrest-able offence, but it would probably be better not to risk it. Merrill would just give all the other prisoners ideas.

The three of them sigh simultaneously, but Hawke is smiling.

"I suppose we'll be spending a bit more time on the mountainside than I'd hoped," she says.

Damn.

+

It's an hour later that they finally have to admit defeat and agree that finding their way to either the rumored treasure cave or back to the trail leading down to Kirkwall are both going to be impossible with the sun sinking rapidly behind the mountain's peak. Hawke only brightly reminds them all that it’s lucky they at least have two tents between them; Aveline doesn’t share her cheer. She could kill Merrill for making them wander around for even longer to find a campsite that won't draw the ire of any prowling Dalish, and she could kill Varric for sending them off on this wild goose chase in the first place -- she could kill Hawke for acting on his tip. Fifty sovereigns for a fool expedition that will as likely end with the lot of them dead as it will with heaps of gold, but Hawke's got all her hopes pinned on it and has been chasing every last bit of coin with almost as much vigor as she's been flirting with her impossible elf. If not for poor Leandra's nerves, Aveline doubts she would even bother to be here--

But that's not true, and she knows it. Her eyes skitter involuntarily towards the source of the insistent laughter ringing across the clearing they've chosen, a buxom figure silhouetted black against the hazy blue of the evening. She remembers the first time meeting her, some night job of Athenril's Hawke was pulling and that Aveline had tagged along for, ostensibly because she wanted to make sure Hawke was doing nothing too egregiously illegal but in reality because all of her patrols were (and still are) empty and useless, and her limbs itch less when she can be where things are actually _happening._

"This is Isabela, by the way," Hawke had said, but only after Isabela had already introduced herself by way of appearing unannounced in a coil of smoke and sinking a dagger hilt-deep in the gut of a man going for Aveline's flank. A pirate with a wicked tongue, she'd found out later, a liar and a cheat who'd been delighted to immediately begin in with barbs disguised as nicknames: _Lady Man-hands_ and _Big Girl_ and others that Aveline doesn't care to keep track of. But in spite of it all there are still times when the only thing Aveline can see is that first impression: a quick, dark woman with golden eyes the color of coins or coal-burnt kaddis, of that one last mouthful of liquor swirling with torchlight at the bottom of a borrowed mug.

Aveline resolutely turns her attention back to the tent she's pitching and lets the laughter wash over her, Hawke's and Merrill's joining Isabela's as she reaches the end of her story. It's not that she resents Hawke's friends, it's just that… well. _Guardsman,_ they think of her. And someday, perhaps, that's all even Hawke will think of her as well. It might have been foolish, to make family out of a woman who'd steadied her hand over a knife bound for her husband’s heart not an hour after meeting her, especially since Aveline isn't sure that it means the same thing the other way 'round -- not that Aveline hasn’t grown used to confronting her own foolishness, recently.

Hawke keeps asking her along, though, now that her time is her own, and Aveline supposes that that counts for something, even if she can't laugh with the rest of them.

It's Wesley's tent that she's putting up, and it's been a year since she was last in Ferelden.

+

She could kill Merrill for wasting their time and Varric for giving them a reason to waste it and Hawke for being so damned unconcerned about the entire thing even though it's her money they're after -- but Isabela is the only person she could kill for gazing at her sad and wide-eyed, shivering wet just outside the tent-flap.

Not that Aveline is usually a sucker for puppy-dog eyes, but her resistance is especially strong in this instance -- it's the bitch's damn fault that she doesn't have any _actual_ clothing, and Aveline's not the one who made it snow.

"I know for a fact that I’m not meant to be keeping watch yet," Aveline says, voice rough with the remnants of the few snatches of sleep she'd managed to grasp at.

"Well, _no,"_ admits Isabela, rubbing her arms. She's got her front half poked through the tent flap, hair hanging down her shoulders -- straight when it's wet, and so, so long. "But I mean, isn't that your thing? Suffering in silence, standing as the bulwark, un-burdening others too weary to go on, and all that?"

Aveline resists the urge to bang her head against a wall -- it wouldn't be very effective anyway, as the walls are made of canvas. She redoubles the intensity of her glare instead. "Others too under-dressed to go on, you mean?"

Isabela rolls her eyes and lets out a huff of white, misting breath. "Yes, _those_ others," she says. "Now are you going to let me in your damn tent or not?"

"And leave the camp unguarded?"

"Oh for the love of -- no one's going to ambush us in the snow. Or if anybody _does,_ well they probably deserve a soft target, for having gone through the trouble to trek all the way up here. That's just fair. Now come on, I swear I'm dying."

"You said you weren't worried about the cold, when we came up here," Aveline accuses.

"I was _lying,_ Big Girl," she sighs, exasperated. "Aren't you a guardsman? Don’t they teach you how to tell these things?"

_I_ wish _someone had taught me how to deal with you,_ Aveline thinks. _I wish I could tell the first thing about you._

But she can't. Tell the first thing about her, can’t _understand_ her at all. And she can’t make herself let her alone ‘til she does. It's the… the _promise_ of her, the potential, the freedom, all of that. And the laughing, always laughing, never weighed down by anything, expectations or obligations or hard, stale grief. And alright, maybe it's also the curve of those lips, and that wicked tongue between them. But mostly it's the _where-in-the-Void-did-she-come-from_ and the _where-is-it-that-she-even-thinks-she's-going,_ the pure shapeless possibility of the thing. And the part that Aveline hates the most -- the _Maker-but-I-wish-she-would-take-me-too._

She reminds herself, constantly, of the things that have worth, have value. Aveline measures worth in sweat and blood and lives, not in pints drunk, loot stolen, or… or in conquests.

Aveline doesn't want to be conquest. Aveline doesn't want to want things that she knows she can't have.

If she really could read minds, she tells herself, then doubtless the inanity going on in Isabela's would rid her of her current state of foolishness, dispel anything desirable about the infatuation. Sex and bad ale and nothing more, nothing that means (ought to mean) anything to Aveline.

But.

"Have it your way," Isabela sighs at her silence, and leans back outside again, finally defeated. "Don't mind me, I'll just go and see if Hawke has room for another body for a bit before she takes her turn. Or maybe they've finally gotten exciting and have been busy getting busy. Hm. I would see if I couldn’t join in, but--"

"You haven't already asked her?" says Aveline, startled, and immediately wants to clamp a hand over her mouth. But it could be worse. At least she hadn't said what she'd actually meant.

_You came to me first?_

"Hawke wouldn't have said no," says Isabela, and pokes her head back through. "I like a challenge. Though right now really what I like best is not freezing to death. Not freezing to death is probably my favorite thing."

Nothing nothing nothing. Nothing that ought to mean anything.

But.

"Fine," says Aveline, before she loses the guts to make herself say it.

"Fine," says Aveline, before she musters the willpower to keep her mouth shut.

Isabela’s eyebrows shoot up, followed half-a-second later by the mirthful corners of her mouth. “But you had best behave yourself,” Aveline adds hurriedly, too little too late, and Isabela scoots inside all at once, shaking the snow out of her hair.

"It’s _warm_ in here,” she says, impressed, once the flap is resting shut behind her. “Ooh, this is much nicer than Hawke's. "

“It’s Templar issue, not the Ferelden army standard,” Aveline explains, wary, as Isabela sheds her borrowed cloak. “They have longer field assignments in rougher country, so they invest in better -- what in the void are you _doing?”_

“It’s wet,” Isabela says matter-of-factly, and tosses her discarded tunic carelessly to a corner to drip all over the canvas, and then gets a look at Aveline’s face. “Oh, _what._ Don’t you pretend to be scandalized by nothing you haven’t seen before.”

And that _should_ be sound enough advice -- breasts are... intriguing, but still just breasts, and it’s not as if she hasn’t seen Isabela’s before, either; anyone who knows her has probably seen the woman topless too many times to count (and if Aveline’s honest, that raunchy, unrepentant boldness is perhaps one of the chief draws of late nights with Hawke at the Hanged Man).

But then Isabela begins to unbuckle a boot, and somehow that’s so much more sickeningly intimate: Aveline’s never seen her without them: salty and sea-worn, boiled leather supple as low laughter, so much a part of Isabela’s persona as to be inseparable from Aveline’s idea of the woman herself -- and it wouldn’t it be so much easier, _simpler,_ to never have to know about the layers underneath, the depths she’s hiding, the legs long and copper and dusted with dark hair, corded muscle fluid in her calves.

It squeezes something inside her that in Aveline’s opinion is much better left alone. She fights down her blush and stares determinedly at a point on the ceiling, mouth set, but Isabela doesn’t seem much bothered. “So Templar issue, huh?” she asks, making conversations as she turn her attention to her other boot, “Can’t imagine they just give these things away. Who’d you have to kill to get your hands on it?”

That question, Maker -- it comes like a slap, but it sucks the anger out of her rather than fueling it: she’s picked so thoroughly over that particular knot of grief, pulled it and tugged every which way into a hundred limp, stray pieces, and by now any new prodding it receives only leaves her exhausted. “I married a Templar,” she explains, voice hard -- unyielding strength has always been her first instinct in the face of any wound. She’s never bothered with a second.

Isabela snorts and unceremoniously kicks off her second boot, entirely bare now -- Aveline wonders how exactly it’s possible to look like you’re being _un_ graceful on purpose. “Smart of him not to argue when you wanted to borrow it. I imagine you’ve got Ser Man-hands trained up well.”

"My husband,” says Aveline, “has been dead a year."

Anyone else would have apologized. Anyone _sane_ would have apologized. Isabela laughs. "What a coincidence! Mine's been dead ten."

Her jaw is so tense she wonders if it might snap. "To the day."

“An anniversary, then.” Aveline chances a look at her: she’s gone thoughtful now, head resting on her knees. A glance between her drawn-up thighs -- no smalls. Aveline refuses to spare a thought to where they might have gone (or if they were ever there in the first place). “And who but you to mark it?"

No one, is the answer; if Hawke remembers, she hasn’t said anything. Hasn’t even mentioned her sister’s passing, hasn’t done anything but continue to throw herself forward, the way she always has -- always will, if Aveline’s any judge.

But it doesn’t matter. The question is nobody’s business but hers in the first place.

Stubbornly, she ignores it. “If we’re not going to bother with keeping watch, you might as well douse the lantern.”

If Isabela chafes at being ignored, she doesn’t show it. Only shrugs with a fluid roll of her shoulders and drapes herself across the the tent's floor. The lantern’s flame is dancing breezily on its wick when she reaches out with two clever, careless fingers. She pinches it dark, and Aveline sighs, finally, at the lack of light, at the things she can leave off examining.

But she’s barely relaxed at all when she feels a hand fiddling with the ties on her bedroll.

One thing after another. “You’re not serious.”

“What, you think I’m sleeping on the canvas?” In the darkness, her voice is its own irreverent shape. “Scooch up, I know there’s room in there.”

It’s barely worth arguing, not at this point. Still, the feeling of a sleek body sliding in behind her is enough to make her wish she had the energy left to put up a fight. She closes her eyes and presses her cheek to the smooth lining of the bedroll, familiar foxfur beneath her skin, worn soft and velvet from years of use. _Red as your hair,_ Wesley used to say, fond, his fingers by her jaw, and it’s been an entire year since she was last in Ferelden -- but that he was the last person she shared this with doesn’t make it any easier to ignore the ropey length of heat blooming at her back. 

All it does is make her ache harder.

The so-called pirate queen doesn’t seem to mind that there’s only Aveline’s thin shirt between them, doesn’t seem to have any reservations about pressing close enough, friendly or teasing or both, that Aveline can feel the peaks of her stiff nipples nudging her shoulder blades. She tenses at the touch of cold skin, imagines the areolas, dark and full and wide as medallions, imagines how she could warm them, the shape of them under her tongue. Imagines how Isabela’s eyes might glint at her from above, a different pair of hands tracing the line of her jaw -- this isn’t a thing she should want.

Isabela has never cared what she wants. Isabela has never cared about nosing through other people’s business, or even about nosing through the frizzy hair lining the napes of their rod-straight necks. “I’ve never put much hold in anniversaries,” she says into the silence curling wretched around the tight muscles of Aveline’s shoulders. “Or I never bother remembering them, anyway. I guess I’ve just never needed an extra excuse to drink.”

Aveline has enough presence of mind left to snort. "That's certainly true."

It’s an un-bothered laugh that answers her. “Well, I guess it is. But I still think it means the same thing.” Her forehead is leaning casually against the crown of Aveline’s back now, strangely gentle, like a gull perching light-footed on the mast, wings already lifted in anticipation of the next gust of wind. “You could try it, Big Girl.”

Aveline says nothing, because there’s nothing to be said.

Isabela sighs, and settles, and tucks her arms tiredly against her chest, finally (hopefully) ready for sleep. "Aveline," she coos one last time, and Aveline spine stiffens in preparation for this final, tiresome assault.

But all Isabela says is, "Thank you."

Aveline feels herself flush from her toes to the very tips of her ears. Somehow the heat of Isabela's breath curling over the freckles gracing her neck feels like more of an assault than any words, teasing or otherwise, ever possibly could.

+


End file.
